I’m working on making the feathers now. I’m probably going to use a mixture between a feather model, alpha mapped planes of feather textures, and some hair strand rendering. Should be interesting if I can pull it off. Crits are always welcome too.
BTW, if anyone has some decent feathers, I could gladly use them. I’m not finding many feathers through google image search. PNG transparency is a bonus. Thanks.
The feathers dont look right stuck into the wing like that. i mean the whole bird is covered with feathers in reality but just because its a mass of white doesn’t make the model any less conviincing. I honestly dont thing you need to add feathers per se, they go against the cartoony feel of the model.
Personally I love it. One thing. If you use particles to do the small to regular size feathers (a good idea considering how many you will have to make) Your duck will get really fat. You might want to skinny it down just a bit.
I decided to go with a more simplistic style then get elaborate and make it as realistic as possible. I’m refraining from adding all the down feathers I wanted to add, and sticking with a more cartoonish style. I’m working on a way to make small rounded feathers on his body using the hair strand rendering, but most of my attempts so far have been very ugly. If anyone has a simple and effective solution, I’m all ears. At the moment, I’m working on rigging him and learning about drivers for facial expressions, etc. Hopefully I can have him walking around in no time, and looking decent.
AFLAC…sorry…your duck just reminds me of those wacky commercials
Awesome work so far. I love the style
One thing you could change though
*The beak should have a lower specularity and it seems a bit too “bumpy” and irregular
whew got back from the Apple store yesterday and fortunatley my HD wasn’t crrupted. I have a fried IDE cable and I just switched the HD over to the 2nd one and I’m back in business again. I’m currently working on rigging this model and setting up everything in the NLA for a short animation, I’ll keep you up to date as I progress.
Wow, this rig has been an insane advanture. Overall, everthing is setup for general animation. I’m working on using Shapes for facial expressions (raising and lowering his eyebrows, moving his tongue, etc), but I’m at least ready to start working on the animation part, which is exciting.
I also got some texturing and lighting work to do, but it’s coming along firly nicely now that I’m not racking my head off armatures and vertex groups for hours upon hours on end. Crit’s always welcome.